TUESDAY, July 14, 2026 (HealthDay News) -- About 40 percent of women are diagnosed with ovarian cancer after emergency hospital admission, according to a study published online July 7 in BMJ Oncology.
Georgia Zachou, M.D., from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and colleagues conducted a national population-based study of women diagnosed with ovarian cancer between 2017 and 2021 in England to compare cancer characteristics for those diagnosed after emergency admission versus other routes.
Overall, 40.3 percent of the 28,204 women were diagnosed after emergency admission. The researchers found that compared with women aged 60 to 69 years, younger (18 to 29 years) and older (80 years and older) women were more often diagnosed after emergency admission (adjusted risk ratios, 1.36 and 1.25, respectively). The risk of being diagnosed after emergency admission was higher for women from the most versus the least deprived quintile of neighborhoods (44.2 versus 37.8 percent; adjusted risk ratio, 1.11). Compared with women who were fit, those with severe frailty had substantially increased risks of being diagnosed after emergency admission (68.6 versus 29.2 percent; adjusted risk ratio, 1.88). Overall, 13.7 percent of the 8,438 women diagnosed after emergency admission and 39.2 percent of the 13,865 not diagnosed after emergency admission had early-stage (stages 1 or 2) cancer.
"Younger and older women, frailer women, and those living in more deprived neighborhoods were at an even higher risk of being diagnosed only after the symptoms of their cancer were so severe that an emergency admission was deemed necessary," the authors write. "Interventions need to be developed and implemented to identify the women who are most at risk, in secondary care settings as well as in the community."
